Category: News

Every January, over 1,800 volunteers ascend to Park City, Utah, to work tirelessly for no pay. Last night, Sundance Institute offered its thanks by throwing them a party. It was just one event on Volunteer Appreciation Day, which also included a special film screening for volunteers and a vignette before every film that screened at the Festival thanking the volunteers for their service.

The buzz about Jamie Travis’s feature debut, For a Good Time, Call…, is that it’s a comedy starring raunchy women. That’s technically true: The movie is about two women who have good reason to strongly dislike one another a full 10 years after they first met, and who end up living together and starting a phone sex business—but to pass the film off as some imitative descendant of Bridesmaids would sell it short. For a Good Time, Call.

For the last five years, Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and the Skoll Foundation have partnered to showcase global innovative game-changers through film. This ongoing project, titled Stories of Change, has spanned the globe—both in search of stories to support, and also to participate in international convenings that shed light on these important stories, the most recent of which occurred at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday, where audiences got a sneak peek at a new crop of projects. These projects feature social entrepreneurs who offer creative solutions to some of the world’s most challenging issues, from poverty to health.

Love is so difficult to attain, and so elusive to keep, that it seems warranted to ask whether filmmakers who pile all manner of obstacles into their characters’ awkward search for it have a little touch of sadism. Take Dennis, the gentle, insecure, and colossal weightlifter at the heart of Mads Matthiesen’s Teddy Bear. Played by weightlifting non-actor Kim Kold, Dennis is 38 years old and a real misfit when it comes to romance – the film opens as he’s uncomfortably failing at the small talk of a first date.

It’s not technically true that Marta, the meek but intent girl at the heart of Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo Celeste, is in every frame of the film, but she might as well be. Rohrwacher has so fully and subtly imagined the struggles and triumphs of Marta’s life, that this inquisitive, brave girl, who doesn’t always understand the forces arrayed against her, hovers in your mind long after the film ends.Played by Yle Vianello, Marta is just entering adolescence as her family moves from Switzerland back to Southern Italy.

Although he’s never been tested this way, David Gray could probably keep his audience hooked while singing the text of a John Deere tractor catalog. Gray performed on Thursday at the Sundance ASCAP Music Café on Lower Main Street to a packed house. The Café was more than packed, actually—there were people perched on steps, people pressing against the barriers set up to ensure the fire department wasn’t going to shut down the house.

The day started with the most inspiring morning at the Women in Film Brunch. There was a sobering speech by Catherine Hardwicke. It was amazing to hear how after Twilight (which made $69 million in its opening weekend) she still couldn’t get meetings to direct after that.

Day Seven of #Sundance on Instagram includes manic visions of a tin foiled topped Santa, an alien-like sun, and a mustached potato.

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Few filmmakers have the kind of range that James Marsh has, alternating between crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winning documentaries (Man on Wire) and pitch-black neo-noir policiers (Red Riding Trilogy: 1980). One year after his Oscar shortlisted doc Project Nim premiered on opening night of the Festival, Marsh was back in Park City on Tuesday night for the world premiere of his latest dramatic film, Shadow Dancer. A gripping, masterfully spare tale of betrayal set in sectarian, Troubles-era Belfast, Shadow Dancer is about a young IRA operative faced with an impossible choice—to accept incarceration and abandon her son, or betray her family, and her cause, by turning informant.

Phoebe Joecks remembers the first day she volunteered for the Sundance Film Festival. Joecks is by profession a “freelance operations maven,” as she calls it. So when she volunteered at the 2008 Festival and was assigned to the Library Theatre, she already had a working background in festival logistics.

Though it’s never been easy to make independent films—not by a long shot—the current economic climate has only made it harder to finance, produce, and distribute the kinds of films that Sundance was created to showcase. This reality makes community-building events like Sunday’s annual Producers Luncheon all the more vital. As attendees chatted over omelettes and mimosas at The Shop—a beautiful old warehouse that normally serves as a yoga studio—Sundance Institute leaders handed out grants, introduced Fellows, and praised the work of producers—the unsung heroes of independent film.

BMI, the music company that manages licensing fees for musicians, gathered no fewer than 17 Festival directors and film composers on stage at the BMI Roundtable Discussion: Music and Film, the Creative Process at the Sundance House on Wednesday. Aligning everyone’s schedules so they could participate and disclose some aspects of the director-composer relationship is difficult enough. But getting the many panelists to find the common ground necessary to converse among themselves, is an indication of the love of film the Festival engenders and the collegiality BMI encourages among its musicians.